Administrative Tribunals Using ADR

This document provides a sampling of administrative tribunals available in Canada, many of which use some form of ADR. The primary focus areas of the tribunals are Health, Environment, Labour and Human Rights

Planar immersion lens with metasurfaces

The solid immersion lens is a powerful optical tool that allows light entering material from air or vacuum to focus to a spot much smaller than the free-space wavelength. Conventionally, however, they rely on semispherical topographies and are non-planar and bulky, which limits their integration in many applications. Recently, there has been considerable interest in using planar structures, referred to as metasurfaces, to construct flat optical components for manipulating light in unusual ways. Here, we propose and demonstrate the concept of a planar immersion lens based on metasurfaces. The resulting planar device, when placed near an interface between air and dielectric material, can focus electromagnetic radiation incident from air to a spot in material smaller than the free-space wavelength. As an experimental demonstration, we fabricate an ultrathin and flexible microwave lens and further show that it achieves wireless energy transfer in material mimicking biological tissue

Some pattern recognitions for a recommendation framework for higher education students’ generic competence development using machine learning

The project presented in this paper aims to formulate a recommendation framework that consolidates the higher education students’ particulars such as their academic background, current study and student activity records, their attended higher education institution’s expectations of graduate attributes and self-assessment of their own generic competencies. The gap between the higher education students’ generic competence development and their current statuses such as their academic performance and their student activity involvement was incorporated into the framework to come up with a recommendation for the student activities that lead to their generic competence development. For the formulation of the recommendation framework, the data mining tool Orange with some programming in Python and machine learning models was applied on 14,556 students’ activity and academic records in the case higher education institution to find out three major types of patterns between the students’ participation of the student activities and (1) their academic performance change, (2) their programmes of studies, and (3) their English results in the public examination. These findings are also discussed in this paperPeer Reviewe

Concerns about losing face moderate the effect of visual perspective on health-related intentions and behaviors

Visualizing oneself engaging in future actions has been shown to increase the likelihood of actually engaging in the visualized action. In three studies, we examined the effect of perspective taken to visualize a future action (first-person vs. third-person) as a function of the degree to which individuals worry about others’ evaluation of themselves (face) and whether the visualized behavior is public or private. Across all studies, the effect of visual perspective was present only for participants with high level of face. In this group, the third-person visualization induced stronger intentions to engage in the behavior when the imagined behavior was public (Study 1), whereas the first-person visualization induced stronger intentions and greater likelihood to engage in that behavior when it was private (Study 2). The influence of the first-person perspective on flossing behavior was eliminated when people with high levels of face were encouraged to consider inter-personal consequences of the action (Study 3). Results are discussed in the light of recent theorizing on the cognitive consequences of taking a third-person versus a first-person perspective in visual imagery

Bipolar disorder with binge eating behavior: a genome-wide association study implicates PRR5-ARHGAP8

Bipolar disorder (BD) is associated with binge eating behavior (BE), and both conditions are heritable. Previously, using data from the Genetic Association Information Network (GAIN) study of BD, we performed genome-wide association (GWA) analyses of BD with BE comorbidity. Here, utilizing data from the Mayo Clinic BD Biobank (969 BD cases, 777 controls), we performed a GWA analysis of a BD subtype defined by BE, and case-only analysis comparing BD subjects with and without BE. We then performed a meta-analysis of the Mayo and GAIN results. The meta-analysis provided genome-wide significant evidence of association between single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in PRR5-ARHGAP8 and BE in BD cases (rs726170 OR=1.91, P=3.05E-08). In the meta-analysis comparing cases with BD with comorbid BE vs. non-BD controls, a genome-wide significant association was observed at SNP rs111940429 in an intergenic region near PPP1R2P5 (p=1.21E-08). PRR5-ARHGAP8 is a read-through transcript resulting in a fusion protein of PRR5 and ARHGAP8. PRR5 encodes a subunit of mTORC2, a serine/threonine kinase that participates in food intake regulation, while ARHGAP8 encodes a member of the RhoGAP family of proteins that mediate cross-talk between Rho GTPases and other signaling pathways. Without BE information in controls, it is not possible to determine whether the observed association reflects a risk factor for BE in general, risk for BE in individuals with BD, or risk of a subtype of BD with BE. The effect of PRR5-ARHGAP8 on BE risk thus warrants further investigation